How talent management can help nonprofits meet 21st century challenges

Nonprofits face unique challenges in the modern world. Many of them perhaps more intractable than in any other sector.

Rising cost pressures and donor expectations combine with mounting regulatory demands – and the complex operational realities of a post-pandemic world – to create mounting operational complexity.

The average person already spends more than a third of their time each year managing admin and performing other low-value and repetitive tasks. As complexity grows, your people will only continue to lose time that could be better spent making an impact in the communities you serve.

Tackling these challenges requires bigger investments in technology. Many nonprofits have already begun the process of retiring legacy systems and migrating to more modern, capable systems. But while the focus may be on improved ERP solutions or financial management systems, many are overlooking Human Capital Management as an area of considerable promise in boosting their overall performance.

In particular, talent management software can play a much more important role in helping your organization navigate its way to a more streamlined and impactful future.

Creating a solid base for impact

The not-for-profit sector is one of the most heavily people-centric industries. Relying more on the insight, skills, and specialist knowledge base of its people than anything else for success. Attracting top talent and retaining people must be top priorities for any nonprofit looking to build a firm foundation for the future.

With the competition for talent getting fiercer by the month, you can no longer rely on word-of-mouth referrals, trial-and-error job listings, or other “passive” forms of talent acquisition. And just as importantly, traditional forms of training, skills management, allocation of workers to projects, and the tracking and management of engagement can no longer be relied on to help you retain the people your organization relies on.

Modern talent management software makes every part of the employee lifecycle easier to manage – integrating data from across your organization to create efficiencies and ensure that your people are engaged and satisfied with their work and the way they interact with the company, allowing you to:

Hire more effectively: By identifying the skills profiles your newest hires will need and seeking them out where they are, and by helping you to identify and build relationships with institutions of interest like educational institutions and professional associations.

Better align your talent strategy to company objectives: All industries face skills gaps, and the nonprofit world is no exception. Talent management software (like Unit4 TM) allows you to identify not just the gaps you have now – but the gaps you’re likely to have in 2, 5, and 10 years time. Letting you manage your peoples’ development and reskilling accordingly.

Make learning work for everyone: One of the main limitations of traditional learning and training models lies in the “mentor bottleneck.” It’s sometimes not possible to find the expertise you need in house, or to create the content you need to create to share it in house. A system like Unit4 TM allows you to create customized learning programs that identify useful outside materials, resources, and experts that can be brought into your own ecosystem to bolster upskilling and create bespoke career development paths.

Align project goals with people goals: Integrating HR data with project management data enables you to assign people to projects based on more than simple availability. It allows you to ensure your people are always working where they can make the most impact and where there skills are most valuable. This capability also lets people align their career goals with the projects they work on, allowing them to gain crucial on-the-job experience of developing skill areas.

Keep track of engagement and performance levels on a rolling basis: One of the most powerful capabilities of our platform is its capacity to measure engagement on a regular basis through anonymised “pulses”. Your people are asked a few questions on a rolling basis about their experience of the organization, and you can analyse the sentiment of their answers according to a variety of different engagement categories.

Coupled with regular scheduled conversations between your people and their managers, the information gleaned from these pulses allows you to remediate problems with individual and team engagement as they arise, proactively highlight flight risks, and ensure that each and every member of your organization can do their jobs to their full ability without running into frustrations – either with their working environment, the way they interact with the organization, or with the way they’re expected to use resources and services.

Want to know more?

Unit4 Talent Management is part of our People Platform – an ecosystem of solutions designed with the need of people-centric industries and sectors in mind. And that’s been uniquely developed to the needs of nonprofit organizations with a forward-thinking approach to the ways their people deliver services and impact. Check out what Unit4 Talent Management can do for your organization today – and learn how it can help you to overcome many of the challenges that currently face every part of the nonprofit sector. Click here to book a short demo today. We’re confident you’ll like what you see.